To recap: By now the major media organizations have called all of the states in the 2020 Presidential election, resulting in an apparent 306-232 win for Biden. The three closest states at this point are: (1) Georgia, where Biden’s margin is 0.28%; (2) Arizona, where Biden’s margin is 0.31%; and (3) Wisconsin, where Biden’s margin is 0.62%. No other state is within 1.0% — not even Pennsylvania, where Biden’s margin has kept climbing since the state was called and is now up to 1.00%.

So, what would it take for Trump to win at this point? Overturning the results in any two of those three states would not suffice. If all three of GA, AZ, and WI were to flip from Biden to Trump, then that would produce a 269-269 electoral college tie. Assuming no faithless electors, that tie would lead to a vote in which each state’s House delegation gets a single vote; and that would probably lead to Trump’s re-election (as going into the 2020 election the Republicans held a 26-23 lead in control of state House delegations).

As such, any theoretical doubt about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election would hinge on somehow reversing the results of three different states, none of which currently have a margin within 0.25%, and none of which seem to have encountered any significant election irregularities.

Nevertheless, this morning President Trump tweeted the following: “He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!” And tonight he followed with this: “Why does the Fake News Media continuously assume that Joe Biden will ascend to the Presidency, not even allowing our side to show, which we are just getting ready to do, how badly shattered and violated our great Constitution has been in the 2020 election.” Later in his Twitter rant he referred allegedly to “millions of ballots that have been altered by Democrats, only for Democrats” and “to voting after the election was over.”

So, yeah, that’s where we are.

A handful of states have already certified their election results, with more to come starting this week. I was glancing through the Delaware certified election results, and comparing them to the 2016 results, and noticed some interesting things:

• Overall turnout in Delaware was up 14% from 2016 to 2020. One might imagine some of that is a “favorite son” effect for Biden, particularly in light of the fact that Biden’s overall margin over Trump was several points stronger than Clinton’s.
• In 2016, only 5.6% of the votes cast in Delaware were “absentee” rather than “machine”, and the absentee votes were slightly more Democratic than average: Absentee votes went 56.2% to Clinton, while machine votes went 53.2 to Clinton%.
• Whereas in 2020, 32.1% of the votes case in Delaware were “absentee” rather than “machine”, and these votes were very heavily Democratic. Biden actually lost the machine vote to Trump in his home state by a slim margin, 208 votes. But, he won 79% of the Delaware absentee vote.

Now: If you just looked at these numbers in a vacuum, bereft of context, might you be able to convince yourself that they are an artifact of election fraud? If fraudulent absentee ballots favoring the Democrats were being added to legitimate votes, it would indeed look something like this: an increase in overall turnout, a dramatic increase in absentee votes, and a dramatic newfound Democratic lean for absentee votes.

But, of course, we have a compelling alternate explanation for this phenomenon, relating not just to a “favorite son” Democratic candidate in Delaware, but importantly also to the politicization of the pandemic: Democratic voters were far more likely than Republican voters in 2020 to place public health interests first by selecting absentee voting over in-person voting. And in the absence of any actual evidence of electoral fraud, there’s no inherent reason to find these results suspicious given the unusual context of our times.